Posts Tagged 'The Dude'

It’s confirmed. The voiceover on the video trailer for Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, the noirish Inherent Vice, is the reclusive author himself. Reading in character as Doc Sportello, the novel’s private-eye protagonist, he has the same laid-back doper’s cadence as Jeff Bridges’ “the Dude” from The Big Lebowski. Pynchon is still cool at seventy-two. Reviews of Inherent Vice have been mixed. (“Feels more like a Classic Comics version of a Pynchon novel than like the thing itself,” says Kakutani in the New York Times.) Nevertheless, Will Blythe’s thoughtful online review at The Second Pass has me wanting to pick up the novel sooner rather than later. (Blythe’s verdict: “Inherent Vice, an act of minor Pynchon, is still major enough.”)